October Vagabonds eBook

But, as I said, our friend in the buggy was by no
means limited to potatoes for his conversation.
He was learned in the geography of the valley and
told us how once the Cohocton River, now merely a decorative
stream among willows, was once a serviceable waterway,
how it was once busy with mills, and how men used
to raft down it as far as Elmira.

But “the springs were drying up.”
I liked the mysterious sound of that, and still more
his mysterious story of an undercurrent from the Great
Lakes that runs beneath the valley. I seemed to
hear the sound of its strange subterranean flow as
he talked. Such is the fun of knowing so little
about the world. The simplest fact out of a child’s
geography thus comes to one new and marvellous.

Well, we had to say good-bye at last to our friend
at a cross-road, and we left him learnedly discussing
the current prices of apples with a business acquaintance
who had just driven up—­Kings, Rambos, Baldwins,
Greenings, and Spigs. And, by the way, in packing
apples into barrels, you must always pack them—­stems
down. Be careful to remember that.

CHAPTER XVIII

A DITHYRAMBUS OF BUTTEEMILK

One discovery of some importance you make in walking
the roads is the comparative rarity and exceeding
preciousness of buttermilk. We had, as I said,
caught up with Summer. Summer, need one say, is
a thirsty companion, and the State seemed suddenly
to have gone dry. We looked in vain for magic
mirrors by the roadside, overhung with fairy grasses,
littered with Autumn leaves, and skated over by nimble
water-bugs. As our friend had said, the springs
seemed to have dried up. Now and again we would
hail with a great cry a friendly pump; once we came
upon a cider-mill, but it was not working, and time
and again we knocked and asked in vain for buttermilk.
Sometimes, but not often, we found it. Once we
met a genial old man just leaving his farm door, and
told him that we were literally dying for a drink
of buttermilk. Our expression seemed to tickle
him.

“Well!” he said, laughing, “it shall
never be said that two poor creatures passed my door,
and died for lack of a glass of buttermilk,”
and he brought out a huge jug, for which he would accept
nothing but our blessings. He seemed to take
buttermilk lightly; but, one evening, we came upon
another old farmer to whom buttermilk seemed a species
of the water of life to be hoarded jealously and doled
out in careful quantities at strictly market rates.

In town one imagines that country people give their
buttermilk to the pigs. At any rate, they didn’t
give it to us. We paid that old man twenty cents,
for we drank two glasses apiece. And first we
had knocked at the farm door, and told our need to
a pretty young woman, who answered, with some hesitancy,
that she would call “father.” She
seemed to live in some awe of “father,”
as we well understood when a tall, raw-boned, stern,